Chip Autieri

Jon Ossoff was 16 when he finished reading John Lewis’s memoir and wrote him a letter. He asked if he could interview him, spend some time with him, anything that would let him learn from the man whose book he had just read. He didn’t expect an answer. Lewis wrote back and invited him to work in his congressional office. There was something about that letter Lewis would have understood. He had written one himself at 17. A college near his home in Alabama had never answered his application, and Lewis wanted to challenge its segregation. He wrote to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. without telling his parents or his teachers. King did not just write back; he sent Lewis a round-trip Greyhound ticket to Montgomery so they could talk in person. Oh my! The first time Lewis and Ossoff sat down for a meal, Lewis spent about an hour and a half telling him about the rabbis and Jewish activists who had marched alongside him in the South. Ossoff was a Jewish kid from Atlanta. He knew from the book what had happened to Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where a state trooper fractured his skull during a march for voting rights. Now Lewis was telling him who had walked beside him. The internship lasted a few months. The friendship lasted 17 years. In 2017, when Ossoff ran for Congress and lost, Lewis was there on election night. A reporter saw him sitting in a small room next to the party, looking out into the room. Later that night, Lewis came out and told the crowd how glad he was that he had answered the letter Ossoff sent him in high school. Lewis died in July 2020, six months before Ossoff won his first Senate race. When Ossoff took the oath of office, he had copies of two old passenger lists in his jacket pocket. One recorded his great-grandfather Israel’s arrival at Ellis Island in 1911. The other recorded his great-grandmother Annie’s arrival two years later. In his hand was a book of Hebrew scripture that had belonged to Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, who led the Atlanta synagogue where Ossoff had his bar mitzvah (this is a Jewish coming-of-age milestone for a boy, usually at age 13). In 1958, white supremacists had bombed that synagogue. Rothschild and his wife, Janice, grew close to Martin and Coretta Scott King in the years afterward. Janice lived long to see Ossoff take the oath with her late husband’s book This week, Georgia reelected 39 year old Jon Ossoff to the United States Senate. At his victory speech in Atlanta, he thanked his wife, Alisha, and their daughters, Eva and Lila. Then he talked about a conversation he expects to have when Eva is older. He imagined her asking what he did when people were losing their health coverage and voting rights were under threat. He told the crowd what he hoped he would be able to say to her. “The year you turned five, Georgia sent me back. Here is what we did with the time they gave us.” Isitoshe, After his win in Georgia, Jon Ossoff is now the prediction markets’ favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. He has the gift of gab and, some women are saying he is easy on the eye. But if he runs, the first test will be South Carolina, where Black voters helped turn Joe Biden’s campaign around in 2020. Ossoff will have to make his own case to those voters and when he talks about John Lewis there, he will tell them about the man who wrote back to him at 16, sat down with him over lunch, and was still in his corner the night he lost his first race. May the day break